this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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More senators gives more power to the smaller states.
The whole idea is ass-backwards anyway. Assigning representation based on lines that were cooked up centuries ago over reasons that are mostly lost to time. It was a compromise to appease the southern Democratic Republicans who feared proportional representation meant they would get trampled on.
And maybe they would. But maybe that also just means that they should. They were worried about tyranny of the majority (i.e. democracy), and now we have tyranny of the minority.
Just gonna skip right on past that reduced threshold to overturn the Senate veto, the having to act on everything they want to halt, and the qualified majority bits huh? Also how in the hell does more senators automatically make small states more powerful? Giving more voice to minorities within small states would technically undermine state level bigwigs trying to have a partisan lock on their senate delegations.
Hawaii is a small state, DC would be a small state, Delaware and most of New England are small states. You really want a one off Republican Majority to be able to just smash Hawaiian autonomy and indigenous rights to pieces without any checks or balances?
This model of the Senate is basically a parliamentary takeover of the role of head of state, only more powerful than the king of england in the sense that it'd be able to invoke the right of veto without instantly causing a constitutional crisis and sparking a revolution.
Small as in population, not small as in size. Most of the states in New England have a bigger population than Wyoming, SD, ND, etc.
Wyoming has a population of 581,381, with 2 senators and 1 rep. That's 581k people per rep, 193k people per congressperson/EC vote. With another senator, that ratio is 145k:1
Massachusetts has a population of 7 million, with 2 senators and 9 reps. That's 777k people per rep, 636k per congressperson/EC vote. With another senator, that ratio is 1:583k.
More senators would give more power to imaginary lines and not to people.
You want to fix Congress, reapportion the house and abolish the senate, or at least severely neuter it. Way too much power granted to way too few people, especially when you consider the committees and the EC.
The concept is outdated. State boundaries mean diddly when we've got instant communication, rapid transportation, and a real loose interpretation of the interstate commerce clause.
ETA: Hawaii, and indigenous rights in particular, are a really terrible example.
Again, just gonna ignore the qualified majority rules huh?
Oh man wait till you learn about Hawaii and how it's autonomy and indigenous people's rights were smashed to pieces when we made them a state
You mean by granting it the most autonomy out of all the states when we made them into a state? They even get to set their own importation laws to maintain their ecosystem.
The annexation was a shit deal but statehood gave them more rights than most explicitly designated ethnic autonomous zones around the world have today.